


Budapest (1956)

by valancysnaith



Category: Chess - Rice/Ulvaeus/Andersson
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-14
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-04-22 20:22:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14316456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valancysnaith/pseuds/valancysnaith
Summary: Seven years is a long time.





	1. Washington, D.C. (1972)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rosehips](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosehips/gifts).



She came into his life just before he checked into the St. Elizabeths Hospital for the second time. They were at the 1972 U.S. Chess Championship in New York City. He was twenty-eight; she was second for a geezer who couldn’t play worth a damn, watching from the sidelines with two frown-lines forming a crease between her strong eyebrows. As he castled he caught her eye and winked.

“Checkmate.”

He forgot the geezer before he was even out of sight. He didn’t forget her, even though his handlers whisked him away before he could talk to her. He didn’t even find out her name until a month later when one of the nameless, faceless orderlies knocked on his open door.

“Mr. Trumper? You have a visitor.”

“Make them go away,” he said without moving. He was lying on the bed, playing a game against himself on the board he could see on the ceiling as clearly as if it’d been painted there.

“If you insist, but I did come a long way,” said a voice he’d never heard before.

He sat up so fast it made his head spin. Or maybe that was the thorazine.

“He’s terrible,” he burst out, because it had been on his mind for a month and the thought was so glad to finally be _free_. “Unimaginative, uninspired, _boring._ Why the fuck do you work for him?”

She smiled. “I don’t anymore.”

Freddie fell in love with her a little bit, at that smile. He didn’t love women like that—he wasn’t sure he loved _anyone_ like that—but she wasn’t anyone. He’d known that since he first caught her eye in New York. She was bright, not bright-cold like the hospital’s white walls and fluorescent lights but bright-warm like sun on his skin after a long winter. His ego said she probably wasn’t that interesting, just like everyone else, but something in his lizard hindbrain warned him not to underestimate her. To be careful. But she looked at him like she really _saw_ him, she felt _real_ like no one else in this padded hellhole, and he thought he might jump off a cliff if she asked him.

He hoped that was the thorazine too but had a feeling it wasn’t.

“My name is Florence Vassy.”

 _Florence_. He repeated it silently over and over, drowning out the whispers of _careful, be careful_ in the back of his head.

“What do you want?”

“To introduce myself. We never met properly.”

An obvious ploy. Everyone knew who he was, and how he was, and what he was. He was Freddie fucking Trumper, _enfent terrible_ of the international chess circuit, certifiable and certifiably brilliant, perpetual pain in the ass to—well, everyone that knew him, really.

But all that was kind of a given, so he just said, “You know who I am.”

She smiled a little, held out her hand. Still in the doorway. He was the one who had to come to her, and even more surprising than the fact that she made him was the fact that he did.

“And now you know who I am, too.”

He shook her hand like it burned. Up close he saw that she was older than he was by a few years, though you’d never know it from her face; it was the dark eyes, fierce and intelligent. She looked _awake_ like so few people but also like she’d been exhausted for years in ways that had nothing to do with sleep. Somehow that made her even more beautiful.

He could feel himself blushing, what the _fuck,_ and turned his back on her just to prove he could, sneering, “What makes you think I care who you are?”

“A hunch. Mine are good, but I could be wrong.” She took a single step into the room. “May I?” she said, meaning _Am I?_

He threw himself back onto the bed with a heavy sigh, like he couldn’t care less what she did. “Well, since you did come such a long way.”

He let the silence stretch into a scream, one of his surest tactics for getting rid of irritating visitors, but Florence didn’t seem to mind. She went to the window, glanced out at the gardens, then relaxed against the wall and watched him. Determined to outlast her, he went back to the chess game on the ceiling, but with mate in twelve anyway and her eyes on him he couldn’t focus. Finally he flopped onto his side and glared, refusing to admit even to himself that he hadn’t wanted her to leave at all.

“Well? What _are_ you doing here?”

“What are _you_ doing _here_?”

“Didn’t they tell you?” By _they_ he meant anyone, everyone. “I’m crazy. Psychotic. Mad as a hatter.”

Florence scrunched up her face in an expression that should have been ridiculous, not charming. _Are you, though? Are you really?_ it said, dubious but conspiratorial. Like she didn’t believe him; she wasn’t going to rat him out to the staff that he was here under false pretenses or anything, but she wanted him to know— _Can’t lie to me the way you lie to them. Don’t have to, either._

Then her face smoothed out and she shrugged, nonchalant. “That’s a shame. I’d like to work with you.”

“For me.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“I have a second.”

“He’s terrible. Unimaginative, uninspired, and boring. I’m not.”

“I’m in a _mental hospital._ ”

“I can see that,” she said wryly. “A nice one. Show me around?”

Inexplicably, he did. His room was on the third floor of the west wing with a few dozen other patients—inmates?—doped up on the same drugs he was. Some of them had self-inflicted scratches on their arms or were missing chunks of hair, some muttered to themselves as they drifted between their rooms and the spacious common area, but if you didn’t look closely you’d never know that this was an asylum at all. A five-star one, as these things went. Movie stars, poets, presidential assassins, and now chess prodigies—only the most exclusive and eccentric at St. Elizabeths, thank you very much. They kept the straightjackets and ECT and surgeries in the east wing. All that was out of vogue these days anyway. When patients disappeared from the third floor it was more likely they’d checked out than been whisked away for some “cure” worse than the disease ever had been.

Not that he told Florence any of that. He didn’t say much at all, just led her on a meandering walk through the lounge, down the stairwell, out into the vast gardens. Usually he wasn’t much for the outdoors, thought nature was overrated and a distraction, but today he didn’t mind it so much. The sun was warm, it was the height of spring, and Florence’s contentment was contagious. Every so often she stopped and tilted her head up to the sky and closed her eyes, drinking in the sunlight the way he drank in the sight of her while she did it. Before they started walking again she’d shoot him another of those conspiratorial grins.

They found a bench in the shade eventually.

“You don’t need to be here, Freddie,” she said, using his first name like she’d known him for years and not a few hours. “You just need to take your pills. And you need to play chess. _Really_ play, against the best in the world, not just yourself. And _don’t_ say it’s the same thing.”

He’d been about to say exactly that and laughed instead. Just a little, barely more than a huff of breath, but it was more than he’d managed in…shit, it felt like months. Months since he’d laughed with anything approaching sincerity—how sad was that? Suddenly he felt so sorry for himself he wanted to cry.

“Why do you care about me? Why are you _here_?”

It came more plaintive than he would have liked.

“Because I want to train a world champion. That means someone who can beat the Russians, and _that_ means you.” She rested her elbow on the back of the bench and her head on her fist, casual in a way that didn’t  match her ambitious proposal at all. “So, you see, I need you as much as you need me. Does that make you feel safer?”

“I don’t know.”

She stood up and brushed off her skirt briskly. He had the strangest sensation of a bubble popping, like they’d been the only two people in the world and now the reality came rushing back in, unwelcome. He almost said _Wait_ but had no idea what would have come after that.

“Take a few days to think about it,” Florence said. “We could make history, you and me.”

Whatever else she was, he knew she was right about that.


	2. New York City (1974)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _What is love? / Baby don't hurt me_
> 
> -Freddie Trumper

Florence took him home to New York City. Not his home there but hers: a sweet, sunlit loft on the Upper East Side with floor-to-ceiling windows that faced the river and a fire escape decorated with bright flowers and trailing vines. Her apartment had the cavalier bohemian ambience of someone who’d pored over interior design magazines; every careless detail was meticulously curated, from the messy stacks of books to the mismatched throw pillows. It was beautiful and charming and insincere. She’s weaponized  _home_ , he thought.

“It suits you,” he told her.

She gave him the little smile that made him wonder if she could read minds and said, “Thanks. You can put your things over there by the radiator.”

The month-to-month lease had run out on his shitty studio downtown while he was gone. When Florence asked if he had friends or family in the city he thought of his mother, east and south across the river, and said he didn’t. (Embarrassingly, it would take years for him to realize that the question was an opening gambit, a probe at potential weaknesses. Florence wouldn’t have come to Saint Elizabeths without knowing everything about him.)

“You can stay with me until you find a place, then,” she’d said, like it was nothing to have a recently-institutionalized stranger move in on a whim. “It’ll make it easier to train anyway.”

Freddie would have asked more questions—“Are you sure?” and “What the fuck?” chief among them—if he hadn’t been in real need of a place to stay and not at all inclined to sleep on park benches until he found one.  

So he slept on Florence’s deliberately-hideous mustard-yellow futon instead, and by the time he remembered it was only supposed to be for a few days it had been months. Spring passed, then a scorching summer and a beautiful fall, and suddenly it was two years later.

That was Florence. Time with her blurred in strange ways, and not only because he was still a headcase or because the pills she insisted he take made him fuzzy sometimes. Some of it was just…her. Weren’t you supposed to get bored of someone when you spent all your time with them? Freddie, who got bored of people when he spent two minutes with them, wasn’t an expert on teamwork, or partnerships, or friendships, or  _whatever_  he and Florence were, but he suspected it wasn’t normal. The fascination he’d felt with her that first day never faded. Her brightness never dimmed.

It helped that she was full of surprises. He learned fast that he hadn’t read her quite right when they met—she wasn’t _all_ warmth and light, there was a side of her that was cold and cunning. She was an academic in every way he wasn’t, analytical and cerebral. It showed when she played chess. It showed in quiet moments just the two of them when she went from being entirely, dizzyingly present to miles away in a second. The shock of that sudden distance always flipped his stomach like bad food.

Freddie was used to attention, and had no problem demanding it when it didn’t fall on him naturally. Irritatingly, none of his usual tactics worked on Florence. He sulked, he stormed out, he smashed things, _her_ things, and it worked in that it brought her focus back to him, only instead of comfort he’d receive a look of remote disdain, like he was a misbehaving child or small dog yapping at her heels.

Directness didn’t work either.

“What is so fucking interesting?” he’d snap, elbowing her sharply and leaving off the obvious _that isn’t me,_ and she’d sigh and say something dismissive, like “Don’t be tiresome, Freddie,” and ignore him again—on purpose, this time.

The attention he really wanted from her came across the chessboard in the second she realized he had her beat, at least a dozen moves before the checkmate itself.

“Now _that’s_ what I call a game. Show me how you did it.”

She’d hang on his every word and move while he backtracked gleefully, her dark eyes flitting between him and the board, chewing her lower lip absently as she concentrated. Like there was nowhere else in the world she’d rather be. And the wide smile when she understood how he’d done it, the way she’d laugh a little and squeeze his hand—happier when she lost than when she won—it was better than any trophy on the circuit.

His perception of the game shifted, reoriented around her like everything else. He’d never wanted to impress an audience the way he wanted to impress Florence when it was just the two of them bent over a board in Washington Square Park. He’d never _craved_  respect from an opponent the way he craved it from her. It was a simple, primal need— _see me, choose me—_ but it was also very complex.  _A_ complex, really.

“I think I’m in love with you,” he said one day, experimentally.

“I’m sure you do,” Florence said.

“Love you or think I do?”

She shrugged, as if to say _Well, you tell me._ They were on Fifth Avenue, eventual destination the Marshall Chess Club west of Gramercy Park, but the club didn’t open for a few hours yet and it was nice outside (Florence had said, while Freddie rolled his eyes) so they’d (she’d) decided to walk instead of taking the subway. She bought him a new cup of coffee every forty blocks and he didn’t say anything about how his feet really did hurt.

Freddie thought about it as they passed high-end department stores and designers boutiques with unpronounceable French names. “Does it make a difference?”

“Okay, Herr Kant.”

Which seemed a little bit of an overreaction, even if she was angry at him for upsetting their status quo, but a quick sideways glance showed she seemed amused, if anything. He decided that must be one of those people she mentioned sometimes that he’d never heard of and not the insult it sounded like.

“What did you mean, _I’m sure you do_?” he said, after they’d walked another two blocks and he’d realized that was the entirety of her response.

“Let’s put it like this. How many women would you say you’ve been friends with during the twenty-eight years of your life before you met me?”

“None, obviously.”

“Why obviously?”

Well, the reason had _seemed_ obvious before he had to find words for it.

“Women are the weaker sex, aren’t they. They’re inferior to men mentally, physically, morally, intellectually. Even if I had been inclined to overlook their inherent shallowness and dishonesty—well, I’ve hardly had the time to waste, have I? What with being a child prodigy and all.”

Florence stopped and stared at him for a long, awkward moment, like she was waiting for him to say he was joking. When she realized he wasn’t, she shook her head and started walking again.

“Oh boy. Sometimes I forget how wrong you are about—everything that’s not chess, really.”

“I don’t mean _you,_ ” Freddie said. “You’re different. You’re not like other women.”

“I’m exactly like other women, which you would know if you ever spoke to one. Freddie, you don’t love me. Well, you _might,_ but your real problem is that you _like_ me. You enjoy my company.”

“I wouldn’t go _that_ far,” Freddie said archly, pretending to be very interested in his cold coffee. “I enjoy that you present a challenge to me intellectually. Sometimes.”

Florence shook her head again and laughed, though there wasn’t anything especially happy about it. “You’re so full of shit.”

“I just said I’m in love with you and your response is that I’m full of shit?”

“This ain’t Hollywood, baby, and you are no Robert Redford.”

Freddie wanted to snap back that she wasn’t…someone…either but didn’t know the female Robert Redford equivalent or much about Hollywood at all. _He_ didn’t waste valuable memory on irrelevant celebrity trivia and obscure academic references that had nothing to do with the game.

They’d come to the shade of the trees on the edge of Madison Square Park, just north of the triangular Flatiron building. Florence sat down on a nearby bench and patted the space to her right, and after a stubborn second Freddie threw himself down beside her.

“We have work to do. I need you clear-headed, focused on the game, no distractions,” she said. “If your feelings for me—whatever they are—are going to be a problem, I need to know now.”

There she was—the critic, the technician. Assessing her resources, one of which was Freddie Trumper. When she got like this, she was ice or stone or some other implacable force of nature. She had the brain for the game, he had the heart for it—between them they just about made one whole player. Maybe even one world champion.

And if that was all they’d ever make, the two of them…well, surprisingly he wasn’t crushed by it. Even glad, deep down? She knew now, he didn’t have to hide it like an embarrassing secret, but nothing had changed, they were themselves exactly as before. If she _had…_ reciprocated, what then? Men in love were supposed to do things he’d never done or had any interest in doing. He’d try for Florence, he’d do anything for Florence, but it all got fuzzy in his head when he tried to imagine anything past the briefest kiss. They were already so tangled up in each other. Any tighter seemed…dangerous.

“Freddie?”

He looked down at the hand she’d placed on his arm, then back at her face. Waited for the resentment to rise, the anger at her rejection. Nothing happened. He could say easily, honestly, “It won’t be a problem.”

“We can move past this?”

“Past what? I never said a thing.”

“You know, I am…unexpectedly fond of you,” Florence said after a stretch of silence, less awkward than it should have been. “That wasn’t in the job description.”

“What job description? I never actually hired you as my second, you know. You sort of just…appointed yourself.”

“Couldn’t take the chance you’d never come up with the idea yourself,” she teased back.

He smiled, a little tight but real. They could do this. They could be this—he could have this. He could have her in his life, in all the ways she’d let him, and it wouldn’t be quite enough because there was no real satisfying this…fixation, obsession, whatever it was, with her—but he could survive on it.

“Let’s talk chess then, partner,” he drawled in his best John Wayne impression, because he did know _some_ pop culture, just nothing recent.

“There’s a new name coming up on the Russian circuit,” Florence said. “Boris Ivanovich. Just a few regional championships so far but it’s a good bet he’ll take the USSR Chess Championship next year and go global after that. His trainer is Alexander Molokov, who runs the premiere stable for grooming Soviet chess champions. He’s also KGB, but who isn’t, over there.”

The name Molokov rang a bell, albeit in a distant and echoing sort of way. Maybe they’d crossed paths at one of the world events, with Molokov backing one of his many losing horses. Nothing Freddie hadn’t promptly, deliberately forgotten. He played best when he didn’t know anything about his opponents. He studied their old games to exhaustion but the rest of it—personal lives, trainers, the habits and history that might lend him psychological insight, he found all that immeasurably boring. Playing the player, not the game—that wasn’t chess.

Besides, that’s why he had Florence.

“What’s Ivanovich like?” he asked.

“Gramercy will have his most recent games. As a player? He doesn’t trust himself. He should, his instincts are good, but he’s too much in his own head.”

“I can beat him,” Freddie said, reading the disdain between her words.

“You can beat him,” she agreed. “But don’t get cocky, okay? There’s always the next guy. One day it won’t be so easy.”

Freddie gasped and clutched his chest, feigning shock. “Cocky? Me?”

That won him a wry grin and a light elbow to the ribs. “Of course, the great Freddie Trumper would _never._ ”

Freddie tilted his head sideways onto her shoulder for a few seconds. “It won’t be a problem,” he repeated, and, like before, really thought he was telling the truth.


	3. Merano (1979)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> UPDATE: chapters rearranged chronologically, most recently posted is chapter 2.
> 
> The night before Merano is bad for both of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> someone asked which version of chess this is based on and the more i tailspin into this fandom the more i realize how much that matters for characterization SO this is based on the kennedy center version where freddie has legit mental health issues and florence is a badass who gets threatened with deportation by the CIA if she doesn't keep him under control. i took liberties with how she's threatened and the extent of the breakdown he's having when he's introduced but what is chess canon anyway??

The flight to Merano is the next evening, 9 p.m. out of London. Florence should be at the hotel packing for the match, ensuring Freddie doesn’t refuse to go because his shirts are folded wrong, or some typically-Freddie bullshit.

Instead she’s chain-smoking in the back of a random bar, on her third glass of wine, choking back angry tears and literally shaking with fury. If Walter de Courcey walked into this bar right now she’d happily punch his lights out. Hell, any American man in a suit would do. There’s a buzzing in her ears, or maybe in her skull, and her skin feels too tight. Her heart is beating so hard she imagines anatomically-impossible bruises in her chest cavity.

Is this what it feels like to be Freddie? She doesn’t give him enough credit.

Fuck them _all._ She wants to scream it. Fuck every single one of those self-righteous CIA assholes and their bullshit politics masquerading as patriotism and their global dick-measuring contest with the Soviets and _especially_ fuck Walter de Courcey’s smug, blackmailing ass. Some of her anger is fear—maybe even a lot of it—but she’s always had a talent for emotional alchemy. Take the fear and pain and transmute them to anger and the coldness Freddie says makes her as crazy as he is—weakness into strength, beat _that_ Isaac Newton.

She’ll need every bit of that strength to get them through Merano.

The thing de Courcey doesn’t get is that Freddie is doing well. Very nearly at his best. He’s taking his pills, sleeping on a regular schedule, training in a way that’s intense but not obsessive, and playing on a level she hasn’t seen since he took down Boris Ivanovich a year ago. He eats. He’s as close to sweet as she’s ever seen him. Part of her anger is on his behalf—how dare de Courcey not _congratulate_ them? Fine, there’ve been some…diplomatically unhelpful comments about the Soviets, but he deserves a presidential commendation for stopping there.

But de Courcey doesn’t want Freddie at his best, he wants Freddie to be a different person. He wants an American champion who isn’t an asshole, who’ll wear the stars and stripes on his lapel and say anything they tell him to and never cause a PR headache for anyone. That’ll never be Freddie. A victory with a headache—the Freddie Trumper experience in a nutshell.

 _You don’t want that, get yourself another champion,_ she’d been about to snap, when he’d threatened her with deportation and every coherent thought flew out of her head.

Hours later, drunk and looking for a fight, she stumbles back to the hotel. The key fumbles in the lock. Her whole weight is leaning on the door so she almost falls flat when it swings open. Immediately goosebumps rise on her arms that have nothing to do with the overly-enthusiastic air conditioner as her body realizes before her brain that something’s wrong.

“Freddie?” she calls.

With him, silence is only ever ominous.

Even more ominous than the silence is the sound that breaks it: the crunch of glass shards underfoot as she steps into the hall. The mirror that hung in the entryway is gone. If he’s breaking mirrors—

No no no no no. Fuck, he was doing _so well._

“Freddie!”

Fear is sobering her up fast but she still has to use the walls for balance as she weaves into the suite’s living room. When she turns on the weakest lamp the soft light reveals chaos but no Freddie. He’s not in the bedroom either. She counts four more smashed mirrors altogether.

The light is off in the bathroom but the door is locked. _Bingo._

“Baby, I need you to let me in, okay? I can help you. Just unlock the door.”

Silence. But she can hear his breathing, fast and harsh, muffled like he has his hands over his face. She imagines him on the floor in there, alone in the dark, and sinks to her knees to match, pressing both palms and her forehead against the door.

“Freddie, please. Talk to me. Tell me what happened.”

He sniffs loudly and his voice is thick more with exhaustion than fear now, though he does his best to sound righteously offended instead. It’s an unbearably hollow approximation of his usual obnoxious self.

“Where were you? I needed you. They were watching me again and I tried to hide but there were too many eyes, I had to break the lenses. I didn’t know where you were.”

“It was just an errand. I told you about it. And I came back as soon as I could.”

For the life of her, Florence can’t remember what the fuck she told him about this errand. Maybe he won’t either. It sure wasn’t the truth: _See, Freddie, what happened was when I went to the lobby to check our mail this morning some Luca Brasi type cornered me in the elevator, made_ real _sure I knew he had a gun, and told me that his boss “requested my presence” at the Victoria Embankment at 7 p.m. And it scared the shit out of me, okay, so I went, and I didn’t tell you because the last thing you need to know is that your paranoid conspiracies are true. That’s how we end up_ here.

But she can talk him down. That skill set is ingrained like muscle memory by this point; even drunk and pissed off, she knows the routine. First the basics: “Room service was supposed to send up dinner for you. Did you eat it? Did you take your medicine? I left your evening dose on the bedside table.”

There aren’t any pills on the bedside table now but that’s no guarantee that he took them, and she doesn’t see any signs of food either.

“I got rid of it, I got rid of all of it. That’s how they’ll get me, don’t you see? They’re trying to make me sick so I can’t think, and if I can’t think I can’t play, and what good am I if I can’t play?”

 _Even if you_ _can’t play_ _you’ll be okay, you’re_ _worth more than the game_ is what she _should_ be saying, but Florence is still stuck at the first sentence.

“What do you mean, _you got rid of all of it_?”

She scrambles to her feet and into the bedroom, tunnel-focused on the inside pocket of her suitcase where she keeps Freddie’s lithium. Standard procedure for years was to keep it on her at all times, he couldn’t be trusted with it any more than he could be trusted to eat or sleep at regular intervals, but she relaxed over the last six months. The tiny pocket in her carryon is useless for everything else but perfect for pill bottles so she started keeping it there instead. Then one night she was in the shower when he shouted that it was time for his dose, and she told him where to find it because surely he’d earned her trust by now, hadn’t he?

Mistake after mistake after mistake.

Nothing. The bottle is gone.

Of fucking course it is.

She goes back to the bathroom door and bangs on it. “What did you do with them, Freddie? You have to take them, you _know_ what happens when you don’t take your pills.”

“I poured them down the drain, every last one,” he shouts back. “They’re rotting my brain, they make everything fuzzy and I can’t focus on the game, just like those commie bastards want!”

Florence slams the door again with the palm of her hand, hard. What, he’s pissed at _her_ now, just because she isn’t coddling him through self-sabotage right before they go to Merano? Though he’s not wrong to expect that, she’s always done it before. But the stakes have never been this high before. De Courcey’s annoying news-anchor voice echoes in her head—“We’ll kick you the fuck out,” like she’s not a person, like she doesn’t have a life in the United States and no connection at all to the country where she lost everything.

She slumps to the floor again, leans against the bathroom door. Too much wine, too many cigarettes. Her stomach churns. She pulls her knees up to her chest and hugs them. _Fuck the great Freddie Trumper too,_ she thinks, but she can’t muster the anger from the bar again. Even the fear that she could turn into anger is out of reach. Now she’s just…tired. The kind of tired where everything feels very far away and she could sleep for days.

Sometimes she wonders what it would be like if someone took care of her the way she takes care of Freddie. Maybe if she asks nicely he’ll trade places with her and she can be the one hiding in the dark alone, locked away from the world.

After a long minute of silence she hears shuffling. She imagines Freddie crawling across the bathroom floor, pressed against his own side of the door, wondering why she isn’t saying her lines to snap him out of it.

_Focus, Freddie. What would you do if your opponent tried to throw you off with a theoretical novelty?_

_And if you were stronger when presented with queen’s side majority pawn?_

_That’s it, baby._

She can’t do it. Not this time. Seven years of this and it’s still not good enough for the Walter de Courceys of the world, who have _no idea_ what they’re asking.

“Florence?”

He sounds hesitant and only a little querulous.

“Please open the door, Freddie.”

He does. Only enough for half his face to appear out of the shadows—one eye red and swollen from crying, half a stubbled jaw, one side of his hair sticking straight up from where he’s grabbed fistfuls of it. Half his mouth is twisted in that confused frown he gets when he doesn’t understand how all the pieces fit together—doesn’t matter if it’s a chess game or a social interaction. When he knows he’s missing something the expression is always the same.

“You’re drunk,” he says accusingly.

“Yes,” she agrees.

“Why?”

Suicidal as it would be, she almost tells him. She _wants_ to tell him so badly. The real tragedy of this—of them—is that she’s all he’s got but he’s all she’s got too. There’s no one else to confide in. Maybe there was once, years ago, before she and Freddie got so wrapped up in each other and in the game that they shut out the rest of the world. They’re a hell of a team on the good days. If she told him, if he understood what was really at stake, he might behave. There’s a lot he won’t do on principle, but not much in the world he won’t do for her, and she’s not above taking advantage of that.

 “Shit, are you about to cry?” Freddie looks horrified. “I didn’t know you _could_ cry.”

She’d laugh if it wouldn’t set the tears off. There it is. That’s why she can’t tell him. She has to be the strong one—Freddie needs her too much, especially before a match like this. He doesn’t have the emotional flexibility right now to see things from any perspective but his own. He’d see her deportation as theft, and if the thought that she might be taken away from him gets into his head he’ll go ballistic. Some inflammatory press statements will be the least of their problems.

So instead she just reaches out and waits for him to do the same. It takes a minute, but he does, and they hold hands across the threshold of the bathroom until his fingers stop twitching in hers.

“There are no cameras hidden behind the mirrors, baby,” she says. “No one is watching you. And your pills don’t make you fuzzy, they let you play without your opponent’s breathing driving you crazy. It’s not the same thing.”

He shakes his head sadly, like _she’s_ the one that doesn’t understand. “I need perfect clarity to anticipate their attacks. The Reds are devious, there’s nothing they won’t do, and they know they’ll never have a better chance to beat me than with Sergievsky.”

“Is that what this is really about? Are you worried that you can’t beat Sergievsky?”

“Jesus, Florence, are you even _listening_ to me?” Freddie sighs dramatically. “I’m not _worried,_ I’m scared shitless, and if you’re not you should be.”

Florence realizes two things at the same time. One: she has a spare dose of lithium in her purse. Once in Paris they lost their luggage and she learned after that never to keep all of his medication in one place. Freddie hasn’t needed an emergency dose in so long it slipped her mind but now she can see the small pillbox buried and forgotten under makeup and maps at the bottom of her bag.

Two: Freddie’s admission that he’s scared is the opening she needed. The rest of the conversation falls into place in her head.

_It’s not that I’m not scared, Freddie. It’s that I won’t give them the satisfaction of knowing it. That’s what they want—to control us._

_I’m not like you, Florence—I can’t just_ pretend _I’m not in danger when I_ am.

_I’ll help you, baby. I always do, don’t I? They’ll try to trick us—fine, we’ll trick them right back. Convince them we don’t know exactly what they’re up to, act like they’re on the level, and then pull the rug out from under them at Merano. It’s just another part of the game._

_I can’t, I can’t. It’s hard enough to remember the truth, there’s so many moves to track, I can’t keep it all straight in my head and lie too._

_You can when you take your pills._

_But they’re gone—fuck, they’re all gone, I’m sorry—_

_If you had them, would you take them? Just until you beat Sergievsky, just to trick the Russians?_

He’ll say yes then, if she puts it like that. She won’t even have to lie. Much.

One and two make three: if she plays it carefully, she can get him back on his medication long enough to make it to Merano, where they can find a doctor who will write them a new prescription. She’ll make that de Courcey’s problem, Florence decides, since he’s so fucking invested in Freddie’s mental stability all of a sudden.

And sure enough, ten minutes later Freddie’s out of the bathroom, because it doesn’t say “world-renowned chess expert” in her file for nothing, and if the CIA thinks that skill set is limited to a board they’re even bigger fools than she thought. She sits him on the bed while she hunts down the pills and a glass of water, then watches while he swallows them to make sure he doesn’t pocket them in his cheek or under his tongue. Back to hospital procedures—patient and nurse, _open your mouth please, Mr. Trumper, very good, back to your room, lights out in ten minutes, group therapy in the morning._

She can tell Freddie is having the same flashback and part of her resents him for reducing them to this when they’d come so far _,_ but he looks shattered. His shoulders are slumped, his fingers picking restlessly at a loose thread in his shirt, which is dark at the armpits and back where he sweat through it during the panic attack. Lashing out at him now would be like kicking a puppy.

She guides his head to her shoulder instead and strokes the short damp hair at the back of his neck. The shuddering breaths exhaled against her collarbone and the arms wrapped around her waist let her know that the double beds are pointless tonight. They don’t fuck anymore, they always give themselves the option of sleeping apart, but sometimes on bad nights he crawls into bed with her and they hold each other in a way that’s so sexless it’s almost innocent, which is strange when she thinks about it, so she doesn’t. Tonight, still tipsy and tired, she might not even mind it too much. Tomorrow she’ll have to face Walter de Courcey and the might of the CIA alone, again; at least Freddie’s a comfort in the dark, in his own way.

“Now what?” Freddie mumbles, a little bleakly.

She kisses his messy hair.

“Now we go to Merano.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Undecided on a solid 90% of where this is going but wooo boy do I have some feelings about these two.


End file.
